Wait... what? Emergency rooms already treat illegal immigrants. They can't refuse care. So this dude is angry and ranting about a a policy that is already in place and has been touted by his own party as the reason why 'everyone already has healthcare'?

Seriously smirk, how do you not start screaming at idiots? Is that the real thing they teach you in order to be a journalist?

Graham: Sort of. I went to an emergency room with a broken foot 4 months ago. The guy in front of me was Hispanic, having a heart attack, and didn't have insurance. (I don't know if he was legal or not, I really wasn't in a mood to probe that sort of question.) I'm white and have insurance. It took them about 2 hours to triage me, X-ray me, give me pain killers, and discharge me with crutches and orders to go talk to a specialist on Monday. I'd broken it several hours before I went in, so I knew I wasn't really that important of a case. But my point: The guy without insurance having a heart attack was still in the waiting room when I left...

They can't "refuse" care, but they can delay them until they either give up and leave, or die. (And people do die in ER waiting rooms.)

In any case, while going to the ER should in theory work fine for heart attacks, (providing they don't let you die in the waiting room which seemed to be what they were going for that evening,) it isn't nearly as great for cancer, or even a broken foot, since it wasn't until 2 weeks later that they did a 4 hour operation to put the screws pictured on the left in, and it took 4 months and a lot of follow up appointments before I could walk semi-normally, (I still have more to go.) I don't know exactly what would have happened if I didn't have insurance, but the non-ER doctors would have been well within their rights to ask questions about how exactly I intended to pay them, and refuse to take me if they didn't like the answers...

How about if we choose to be free from these ignoramuses?

What evidence do you know have from the heart attack patient that his condition was more urgent?

OMMFG I would have been lead out of there by police screaming my head off!

@D: Uhmm, foot pain vs chest pain? I'm not a doctor, but still, that one seems pretty obvious to me. And it wasn't like I was bleeding or anything, I could have just been an addict looking for a fix for all they knew before they took the X-rays...

I mean, I can understand that there may have been a shortage of EKG machines or something where as the X-ray machine is generally not a bottleneck, but ignoring pipeline effects, it still seems like you'd want to at least take a look in less than 2 hours. Of course, one of the main causes of non-heart attack chest pain is anxiety, which would just be made worse by waiting in the waiting room for 2 hours, (not to mention the obvious effect that that has on the other patients waiting.)

The trouble with illegals w/out insurance is that they are taught by activists to go to the ER for any medical condition, which clutters up the ER with non ER patients.